People’s Palace

Emma Biggs — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:15:00 +0000

I have recently come across an artist whose work I think is amazingly good. His name is Alexander Deineka. He was a Russian, born to a railway worker. He was a revolutionary, and member of the ‘October’ association of artists. I haven’t been able to find out much about his life under Stalin, but he was more than a survivor – being in the rare position of having permission to travel and show work abroad. He was a ‘Hero of Socialist Labour’ and was awarded the ‘Order of Lenin’. From the 1930s onward he could be described as a Social Realist painter, but his work manages not to have the sickly propaganda qualities of much Social Realism. I came across him because he designed a large number of mosaics, perhaps most famously for Mayakovskaya Metro Station in Moscow. The Moscow Metro stations were designed to be the new palaces for the proletariat.

Deineka’s mosaics, and there are 34 of them, are installed on the ceiling, and have the theme ’24 hour Soviet Sky’. Architectural mosaic can often be decorative, or highly conventional in form, but these are neither. He uses the idea of looking into the sky as a metaphor for looking into the future, and the future he sees is a Soviet one. These are genuinely original works, casting off the conventions of mosaic depiction and using instead the modernist language and novel perspectives of fellow radical artists like the photographer Rodchenko – also a member of ‘October.’ Working at a time when modernism was becoming outlawed in favour of a sycophantic photographic idealism, these mosaics still have the power to surprise and arrest the viewer. Here are some images:

Mosaic » Mayakovskaya Metro

People’s Palace